Makroskopische Eigenschaften von elektrogesponnenen Nanofaser-Vliesen: Vergleich von theoretischen Vorhersagen und experimentellen Befunden

Highly porous nonwovens composed of nanofibers and produced by electrospinning are key elements in a broad range in technical but also in Life Science areas. Applications for gas or fluid filtration, textile applications, carriers for catalysts and scaffolds for tissue engineering are selected examples. These applications require well defined nonwoven parameters such as in particular pore diameters, internal surfaces as well as permeation properties. Electrospinning, on the other hand, allows to control structural parameters such as fiber diameter, nonwoven architecture as well as in certain limits the total porosity. It is thus highly important to know as much as possible about the correlation between the structural parameters controlled by electrospinning and the parameters controlling the performance of the nonwovens composed of the electrospun nanofibers. In the present work we look at predictions on such correlations coming from Monte Carlo simulations on ideal nonwovens, we analyse this correlation for different types of real and as such nonideal nonwoven composed of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and polyamide 6 (PA 6) fibers on an experimental scale, and finally we compare experimental results and predictions. From these investigations it seems that one may use Monte Carlo simulations as performed for ideal nonwovens with significant success also to set up structure property correlations and consequently to design nonwovens with predetermined properties and functions for electrospun nanofiber based nonwovens of the kind considered here.